Cross country season moving to November for junior highs

ROBERT AVERY

Published 9:19 am, Monday, July 1, 2013

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A girls intermediate school cross country race in 2012 is about to leave the starting line sometime in February. The upcoming school year will see the races taking place in their new time frame of November and December.Photo by Robert Avery/The Citizen less

A girls intermediate school cross country race in 2012 is about to leave the starting line sometime in February. The upcoming school year will see the races taking place in their new time frame of November and ... more

Cross country season moving to November for junior highs

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For the intermediate school cross country runner that dreams of taking his or her distance running skills to the high school level, they will now have one thing in common with the high school runner other than a passion for running.

They both will be running in the fall.

Plans are in place for the Pasadena ISD intermediate school cross country season to be moved from February to November, starting this school year, Athletic Director Rodney Chant has announced.

For untold years, the athletic calendar reserved three cross country races starting in late January or early February, leading to district championship races for the seventh and eighth grade girls and boys divisions on a fourth date. It essentially coincided with the conclusion of the basketball season at the intermediate schools.

Now those two-mile races will be taking place on the heels of high school cross country’s conclusion. This past November, the Region III and state championship meets were held over the opening two Saturdays of the month.

PISD will keep the cross country fires burning by starting the season this year on Nov. 14, taking Thanksgiving week off, returning for the final two meets, before finishing with the district championship meets on Dec. 11 at a site to be determined.

“It’s extremely difficult to schedule stuff in the spring. So we’re going to try this year moving cross country at the end of football and the start of basketball and overlapping a couple of weeks in basketball. The kids running and getting in shape will only help basketball and vice-versa,” Chant said.

Inserting intermediate school cross country into the fall sports calendar will free up an additional week for track meets, starting a week sooner. The goal, says Chant, is for track and field season to finish by the close of March because April means the arrival of tests.

“We eliminate issues with testing. You have testing the first week of April, high school district track meet the second week and the last week of April is TAKS test. We don’t want to go into May because that’s when our coaches go down to the middle schools, developing a relationship with those kids that will be coming into their program. We’re going to try it and see how it works. Hopefully, it will work out,” Chant said.

For schools like San Jacinto Intermediate, Bondy and Southmore that really take their cross country season seriously, there will be an adjustment, not just for the coaches but for the athletes. However, other school districts use this same period of the year to schedule their cross country campaigns and it’s apparently been good to them.